NEEDY CASES
OCTOBER 2007 VISIT

During our visit in October 2007 we have seen some particularly needy cases.
These are just a few of them.

Janet

Janet is an active member of the school committee at Alara Primary School
near Kisumu. She has three children, all attending Alara Primary School.
The oldest is in Std. Class 4. (Aged 11)

Janet's husband died of HIV AIDS. Her father died yesterday. She is far from
being healthy and also has HIV, and does not expect to live more than a couple
of years. (Thankfully she is receiving some drugs to stave off the effects
of her illness). She has no job or any means of support. There is nobody
to look after her children apart from herself.

Janet is worried how she will support her children right now, and worse still,
what will become of them when she dies?

October 27th 2007

After discussions with Tom and Perez we have today found a solution to help
Janet. Tom's idea.... which will work:

We have donated Ksh 6,000 (£44.22) to Janet to buy several large sacks
of maize from a wholesaler. With this she will go to Kiboswa market and sell
the maize. Money from the sales will provide enough to buy several more sacks
of maize plus a profit which will be used to buy food and clothes.

Setting up a small business like this will enable her to be self sustaining,
and also to save some money too. She wouldn't have been able to do this without
the little capital investment that we have made.

Vivian

Vivian lives with her grandmother in the Manyatta slum district of Kisumu,
with two brothers and two sisters. Both her parents died from AIDS. She has
a four year old daughter. None of the family have any job or means of support.
It is likely that Vivian also carriedsthe HIV virus.

Girls such as Vivian will do anything to earn money for food. Her situation
is desperate. There is only one way that she can earn some money to help
feed herself and her grandmother, and that is by selling sex. If she can,
she will earn Ksh 200/= (£1.45), although when really hungry she might
go as low as Ksh 50/= (£0.37).

She doesn't want to do this! But jobs are so scarce. She would like to train
to be a hairdresser, but that would require training.

Cynthia

Cynthia lives with her two younger brothers at their grandmother's house.
It is one room divided by a curtain, in a slum building .

The family lives in apalling conditions.

Cynthia is pregnant and will have her baby in two month's time. In order
to earn money to feed her grandmother and younger brothers, she will sell
sex. She doesn't want to do this, but there is simply no alternative. Without
some form of training, she cannot get a job.

Kisumu is the third largest city in Kenya, with a population of about two
million. Most of them live in slums, and there are thousands of girls in
the same situation as Cynthia.

The building where Cynthia lives has six "apartments", and each apartment
has one room, in which there is a destitute family.

The conditions are truly horriffic. There is no electricity, no water, and
no toilet. People just do it outside. We were hit by the smell of excrement
as we walked towards the building.

What can be done to help young girls such as Vivian and Cynthia? Is it
a hopeless situation?

A possible solution.

We visited a local hairdresser Roslida Amyembe, who owns her own hairdressing
salon. She started the business in 1999. She was married in 1998, and her
husband died in 2004. She has three children. She would be willing
to train Vivian and Cynthia to be hairdressers. An initial sum of Ksh.6,000/=
(£44.00) would be needed for hairdressing equipment and she would be
happy to take up to six orphan girls like Cynthia and Vivian for Ksh 2,500/=
per week (£18.43) - that's for all six girls. That would be needed for
about six months until training was complete, after which the girls would
be in a position to set up their own hairdressing businesses.

Left: The salon run by Roslida Amyembe.

We took Cynthia and Vivian there to discuss the possibilities.

The project would cost a total of Ksh 68,500/= (£505.00) to train
up to six girls for the 6 month period.

Could this be an answer to the plight of six girls in this horrible situation?

If you would like to help us with this project, then please click on the
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No matter how small, we really appreciate your donations, and the Kenyans
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nothing comes out for administration costs. Every penny of donations gets
put to good, direct use.

If you fancy coming with us on one of our future trips to Kisumu, then let
us know. We'll not hide the fact that you will pay for your trip expenses,
the hotel where we stay in Kisumu isn't 5 star (its cheap and basic, but
OK), you will need lots of innoculations, and you will eat basic food. But,
you will have a life-changing experience, and you will want to go back again
and become even more involved.